The Nigger of the "Narcissus"

DOVER · THRIFT · EDITIONS

The Nigger of the Narcissus

JOSEPH CONRAD

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JOHN BERSETH

Copyright

Copyright © 1999 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1999 and reissued in 2016, is an unabridged republication of a standard edition of the work. The Note has been prepared specially for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924.

The nigger of the Narcissus / Joseph Conrad.

p. cm. —(Dover thrift editions)

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-15913-3

1. West Indians—Travel—England—London—Fiction. 2. Terminally ill—Psychology—Fiction. 3. Tuberculosis—Patients—Fiction. 4. Ocean Travel—Fiction. 5. Blacks—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

PR6005.O4N5 1999

823'.912—dc21

99-35223

CIP

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

40880902 2016

www.doverpublications.com

Note

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857–1924) found the themes and settings for most of his novels and short stories in his long experience sailing on merchant marine ships, and in the ports he visited, especially those of East Asia. Born Jézef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in the then-Russian-ruled Ukraine, he first visited England in 1878, wrote his first known letter in the English language in 1885, and published his first novel in masterful English prose in 1895.

Joseph, whose parents were prosperous, was orphaned at an early age. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865 and his father succumbed to the same disease four years later. In his last years, when he lacked both health and wealth, Joseph’s father, a poet, translated literary works from English and French to make a living. As a boy, Joseph read novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray, in Polish and French.

When Joseph’s father died, his uncle Tadeusz Bobrinski, a lawyer, took responsibility for the boy with affection and generosity. Young Joseph, sent to school in Switzerland with a tutor after he left a school in Cracow, insisted on going to sea. Before he was seventeen, he set out for the French port of Marseilles with a letter of introduction.

At first, Joseph sailed to the West Indies on French merchant ships. He probably engaged in gun-running on one trip. In his home port of Marseille, he was heavily in debt. A gunshot wound on the left side of his chest, which left a lifelong scar, was said by his uncle to be self-inflicted. In 1878, after he recovered, Conrad sailed to Constantinople on a British freighter, to avoid being conscripted into the French Navy when he reached his twenty-first birthday. That year, during his first visit to England, he spent three weeks in London. He sailed for Australia in the following year.

In 1880 Conrad passed the examination to serve as a second mate. As a junior officer in 1883, he shipped on the Riversdale from London to India, where he transferred to the Narcissus. It was this experience that provided him with some of the material for his third novel, and the first that took place at sea, The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). Conrad won his master mariner’s certificate in 1886 and took command of his first ship, the Otago, in Bangkok after the previous captain had died at sea. During the passage to Singapore, everyone on board except the cook and Conrad was incapacitated by fever. It was an experience he never forgot.

In 1889 Conrad fulfilled a childhood dream when he commanded a trading steamboat on the Congo River. This experience led to the writing of his greatest short story, Heart of Darkness (1902). The young writer met the eminent novelist John Galsworthy on a voyage to Australia in 1892, and the two became lifelong friends. Encouraged by Galsworthy, Conrad began writing in earnest. His first two novels were Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896). Lord Jim, his critically acclaimed fourth novel, was published in 1900, but Conrad did not gain a wide readership until after 1910. By then Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and several other of his books had been published.

The Nigger of the Narcissus is a story that revolves around a black man, James Wait from the British West Indies, wracked by tuberculosis, who signs on for a voyage from Bombay to London. As he comes to perceive his coming death, Wait reacts in terror, anger, and confusion. Most of the other seamen are ambivalent, sympathetic yet frightened of the illness. The ship becomes a vessel of simmering emotions, threatening to boil over in fury and hatred. A few months after finishing the novel, Conrad wrote his famous preface, The Task of the Artist. When a writer succeeds, he wrote, behold! — all the truth of life is there. Later, he claimed The Nigger of the Narcissus as the story by which, as a creative artist, I stand or fall. When Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack in 1924, he was among the world’s best-known and most admired writers of fiction.

Preface

A WORK that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential — their one illuminating and convincing quality — the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts — whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism — but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims.

It is otherwise with the artist.

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities — like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring — and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition — and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation — to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple, and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendor or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive, then, may be held to justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply an avowal of endeavor, cannot end here — for the avowal is not yet complete.

Fiction — if it all aspires to be art — appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal, to be effective, must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the color of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music — which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

The sincere endeavor to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness, or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: — My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

To snatch, in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal the substance of its truth — disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.

It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them — the truth which each only imperfectly veils — should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all — Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial Sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of) — all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him — even on the very threshold of the temple — to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself loses the exciting ring of its apparent immortality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a laborer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms; we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understand his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength — and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way — and forget.

And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim — the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult — obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and the return to an eternal rest.

J. C.

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

I

MR. BAKER, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck. Above his head, on the break of the poop, the night watchman rang a double stroke. It was nine o’clock. Mr. Baker, speaking up to the man above him, asked: Are all the hands aboard, Knowles?

The man limped down the ladder, then said reflectively: I think so, sir. All our old chaps are there, and a lot of new men has come. . . . They must be all there.

Tell the boatswain to send all hands aft, went on Mr. Baker; and tell one of the youngsters to bring a good lamp here. I want to muster our crowd.

The main deck was dark aft, but halfway from forward, through the open doors of the forecastle, two streaks of brilliant light cut the shadow of the quiet night that lay upon the ship. A hum of voices was heard there, while port and starboard, in the illuminated doorways, silhouettes of moving men appeared for a moment, very black, without relief, like figures cut out of sheet tin. The ship was ready for sea. The carpenter had driven in the last wedge of the main-hatch battens, and, throwing down his maul, had wiped his face with great deliberation, just on the stroke of five. The decks had been swept, the windlass oiled and made ready to heave up the anchor; the big towrope lay in long bights along one side of the main deck, with one end carried up and hung over the